The present invention relates generally to the field of domain-specific languages, and more particularly to parsing domain-specific languages.
A domain-specific language (DSL) is a computer language specialized to a particular application domain. This is in contrast to a general-purpose language (GPL), which is broadly applicable across domains and lacks specialized features for a particular domain. DSLs provide a convenient way to instrument applications and engines. There are a wide variety of DSLs, ranging from widely used languages for common domains (e.g., HyperText Markup Language (HTML) for web pages), down to languages used by only a single piece of software. DSLs can be further subdivided by the kind of language and include domain-specific markup languages, domain-specific modeling languages (more generally, specification languages), and domain-specific programming languages. DSLs are capable of expressing complex condition-action rules and event-processing rules. The DSLs can support a rich domain vocabulary allowing the formulation of complex, nested expressions.
In computer science, an abstract syntax tree (AST), or syntax tree, is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of source code written in a programming language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring in the source code. The syntax is “abstract” in not representing every detail appearing in the real syntax. ASTs can also be used in program analysis and program transformation systems.